To some, VMware beefing up support for ESX is a natural evolution of the company's OpenStack efforts. "It almost would have been surprising if they hadn't announced this," says IDC analyst Gary Chen. "If VMware wants to be a true foundation member, it really needed to do this."

VMware is treading a delicate line though, he notes. OpenStack, in some respects, represents competition for VMware.

OpenStack is already being used by some big-name public cloud providers - such as Rackspace and HP - to launch public cloud services. That puts it in direct competition with VMware's vCloud Director.

A variety of other OpenStack companies, such as Piston Cloud Computing, CloudScaling and even Canonical and Red Hat are packaging OpenStack code as a private cloud management platform that could represent competition for VMware's vSphere product line.

Chen says VMware wants to be able to support customers who are using non-VMware products, as evidenced by the company's purchase of , which allows users to manage heterogeneous workloads. The company that technology into its offering in recent weeks.